If you want more information and want to see an interactive demo of the horizon graph along with all our visualizations, please contact me at debra.leibowitz@panopticon.com.

Debra

Info and free registration here:

http://www.panopticon.com/news/webinar_sdk_v5_1_15jul08.htm

Hugh

I’m working on a video and I’ll let you know when that’s available. There is some more info available on the Panopticon website.

Of course we can easily show it to you in an online demo or something. Let me know if you’d like to do something like that.

Horizon Graphs are part of our Visual Business Intelligence suite. They are available in the form of an SDK (Java or .NET) that you can use to embed the tools into your own app - or you can build your own VBI platform using the SDK.

I can only think of one alternative - an animated time series, a la http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2008/06/16/flex-dashboard-boston-fed/

As a flat visualisation, I can’t do better than the horizon chart.

Hugh - ditto what DataViz said - can we see the interactive one in action?

I can understand that it’s a bit hard to understand the real value of the Horizon Graph when looking at a static image. It really comes to life as an interactive visualization. It lets you filter out the less interesting info, group and re-group the data, zoom in, and there are hover displays that provide details on demand.

I don’t think too many people will try to incorporate a Horizon Graph into a dashboard per se, but it’s a great thing to have on the screen when you need to compare charts for large numbers of entitities.

Have a continuous colour gradient rather than discrete steps and then each entry has a bar which is continually changing colour.

It would be far less confusing.

1. Is the line graph needed? Could this not be a simpler visualization if the change each day is coded only in the intensity of red or blue - that is, the red or blue is the entire height of the line for each stock?

2. If the stock were grouped by type (and a couple of options were given for sorting, such as sector, country, size, etc), then you could easily see multi-line blobs of red or blue that indicate that a group is moving in the same direction. Further, if a single stock is moving against the grain, that would add a lot of visibility.

3. I’d love to know more about the use case for this graph. Who looks at 50 stocks over so many weeks on a single screen? What is her purpose in doing so?